The rise of intergovernmentalism and transnationalism

It is, of course, commonplace to criticize the UN for the many ways it and the nations that created it have fallen short of its ideals. Yet it would be utterly mistaken to underestimate the successes wrought by the UN system overall and the geopolitical stability that followed its foundation. The decades that followed World War II were marked by peace between the great powers, although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created the conditions for what now can be recognized as the almost unprecedented period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onward.Footnote ⁶ The UN is central to this story, although it is by no means the only important institutional innovation of the postwar settlement. A year prior to the founding of the UN, the Bretton Woods organizations were established in an effort to foster economic cooperation and a prosperous global economy: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (previously the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development). The former focused on exchange rate stability and balance of payments assistance, while the latter on long-term economic development. A sister institution, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which would later develop into the World Trade Organization (WTO), committed countries to open their borders to foreign trade. All of these institutions lay at the heart of what we now call postwar ‘economic globalization’ ‒ the growing enmeshment of economies across the world through trade, finance, and foreign direct investment, and a sleuth of policies that facilitate economic interdependence. While the economic record of the postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth, and living standards rose rapidly across many parts of the world. It was not just the West that was redefined by these developments; a global division of labor emerged which linked economic flows across large swathes of the world. In the wake of these changes, the world began to shift ‒ slowly at first, but later more rapidly ‒ from a bipolar toward a multipolar structure. By the late 1980s, a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the late 1990s countries such as China, India, and Brazil had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this day.

The geopolitical stability engendered throughout the postwar years was a precondition for economic globalization, which subsequently transformed the way business and commerce were organized. Markets that were first and foremost domestic networks increasingly took on global dimensions. National economies became heavily enmeshed in the global system of production and exchange. Multinational corporations, many of which came to enjoy turnovers that dwarfed the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of even medium-sized nations, expanded across the globe. Financial markets exploded into a world of 24-hour trading, aided by competition between states eager to attract increasingly mobile capital flows. Economic globalization, with all its benefits and costs, winners and losers, came to embrace all regions and continents, and global interdependence deepened to a hitherto unknown degree.Footnote ⁷

Meanwhile, international cooperation proceeded at an impressive pace. Whereas once participation in the multilateral order was sporadic and tenuous, it became both more entrenched and regularized. The most obvious illustration of this is the rapid emergence of diverse multilateral organizations and transnational agencies. New forms of multilateral and global politics became established, involving states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and a wide variety of pressure groups. The numbers of active IGOs and INGOs increased exponentially. There was substantial growth in the number of international treaties in force, as well as the number of international regimes, formal and informal, altering the political and legal context in which states operated. To this dense web of mechanisms of coordination and collaboration can be added the routine meetings and activities of the key international policy-making fora, including not only the UN and Bretton Woods organizations, but also the G-groups (the G5, G7, G20, etc.). Whereas in the middle of the nineteenth century there were just one or two interstate conferences or congresses per annum, the numbers increased into the many thousands each year.Footnote ⁸ Accordingly, states became enmeshed in an array of global governance systems and arrangements.

At the same time, new kinds of institutional arrangements have emerged alongside formal intergovernmental bodies. Networks of ostensibly ‘domestic’ government officials now link with their peers across borders.Footnote ⁹ Different kinds of actors, public and private, form partnerships with each other to tackle issues of mutual concern. And purely private actors have created an array of their own governance institutions, ranging from voluntary regulations to private arbitral tribunals.Footnote ¹⁰ In some ways, these new institutions reveal the adaptability and flexibility of global governance. But they also face, as later sections show, significant limitations.

As forums for collaboration and engagement multiplied, they facilitated direct links between world powers, regardless of how explosive the rhetoric between them sometimes became, and opened the door for peripheral states to participate in the global order. Significantly, however, these institutions also embedded in their infrastructures and modus operandi the privileged positions of the 1945 victors. This was, arguably, a compromise needed to give incentives for great powers to participate in the new multilateral order.

The changed landscape of global politics

A number of trends can be identified within the changed landscape of world politics. First, there has been a general trend of integration between national and international political arenas.Footnote ¹¹ The relationship between national governments and international bodies is not unilinear, but rather overlapping and reflexive to pressures coming from all sides (domestic constituencies, IGOs, global civil society, etc.). The two distinct spheres of traditional politics ‒ national and international ‒ have merged in some key respects. From global trade rules to intellectual property rights, from the global financial crisis to climate change, issues are posed for all levels of politics. A significant variety of institutional arrangements has been created in response to this trend, and this has included substantial innovation and change resulting in diverse forms of multiactor, multisectoral, and multilevel governance.

However, the integration of national and international politics has also had an impact on our understanding of politics. The manner in which politics is conceived in the contemporary world can no longer be focused only on realist state-centric modes of analysis. While this shift in perception has had its critics, the realities of politics today give little support for seeing the nature and form of global governance through the lens of the unitary state acting alone, despite the resilience of great power politics. The greatest issues now confronting the world are not delineated and distributed neatly along national boundaries, and neither is the debate on how to solve them. The diffusion and growth of transborder governance arrangements reflect this integration of politics in significant ways. Any other starting point simplifies the character of the form and nature of global politics, and masks the nature of political relationships in the contemporary world.

A second trend that can be observed since 1945 is the emergence of powerful nonstate actors in the development of transborder governance. Nonstate actors such as INGOs, MNCs, and even individuals have always been active agents in political debate, but the manner in which they influence international politics has changed in significant ways. While these actors had varying degrees of influence in international politics in earlier periods, their impact came largely through lobbying their national governments. In this mode of political influence, nonstate actors aggregate and articulate domestic interests to the state, shaping the preferences of a state that in turn determine the state's behavior in international politics.

Although the direct relationship between nonstate actors and the state remains an important link for political participation, nonstate actors now also influence international politics more directly.Footnote ¹² Through direct lobbying of global governance bodies, nonstate actors shape the political debate internationally, in turn impacting on the behavior of states from both above and below. The process which led to the Ottawa Treaty (concerning the ban of landmines) is perhaps the most prominent example of nonstate actors participating in security governance with marked success.Footnote ¹³ This trend in general is strongest, however, in environmental governance where INGOs have become such important actors that their influence has been called ‘functionally equivalent to diplomats’, since they perform ‘many of the same functions as state delegates’, such as interest aggregation and articulation, negotiation, and submitting policy recommendations.Footnote ¹⁴ The emergence of nonstate actors certainly creates a more complex governance system than one comprised of traditional principal-agent relationships between states and purely intergovernmental organizations. This can pose potential problems of governance fragmentation, but it also broadens the platform for political deliberation and debate.Footnote ¹⁵

Third, there has been a shift in how regulation and governance are enforced. The diverse forms of global governance produce equally diverse regulation that is intended to shape the behavior of states. This requires, first and foremost, the participation of states in regulatory structures, but it also requires that states comply with the result of negotiations, even if it is against their own self-interest. Traditionally, compliance in international agreements is linked to the possibility of punitive measures (i.e. sanctions) that penalize violators in order to ensure appropriate conduct. Increasingly, however, trends can be detected that ensure that rules are enforced through alternative means such as voluntary-based arrangements and initiatives, as well as international standards that are adhered to by actors because of their reputational and coordinative effects.Footnote ¹⁶ Norm diffusion and capacity building can be an even more powerful tool for behavioral change than punitive measures.Footnote ¹⁷ This approach seeks to do more than just punish violators by building the capacity and incentives for actors to comply with established international standards. Institutions such as the UN Global Compact and the International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement are good examples of the voluntary and informal regulation that is growing in global governance bodies.Footnote ¹⁸ These innovations in compliance schemes are positive steps in developing governance that is more effective; they indicate a range of productive experiments in new methods of creating rules and systems of enforcement which a diversity of public and private actors can both engage with and uphold. Self evidently, however, they are not sufficient in and of themselves to solve the problem of compliance and enforcement as a spiral of global ‘bads’, from global financial market instability to climate change, continues to form.

Fourth, overlapping with the trends mentioned above, there has been a proliferation of new types of global governance institutions in the postwar era, and especially since the end of the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁹ These are not multilateral, state-to-state institutions, but instead combine various actors under varying degrees of institutionalization. In some areas of global governance, these kinds of institutions rank among the most important. The case of global finance stands out in this regard (e.g. the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Financial Stability Forum),Footnote ²⁰ but other examples include global health governance (e.g. the Global Fund, the GAVI alliance, and polio eradication efforts)Footnote ²¹ and standard setting.Footnote ²²

In aggregate, these new institutions have contributed to the growing polycentricism observed in many areas of global governance. A polycentric approach can have advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it can mean that more issues are addressed in meaningful ways – through specialized bodies qualified to regulate and govern a specific issue area. On the other hand, it can exacerbate institutional fragmentation. More importantly, in many areas of global governance it is by no means clear that institutional innovation alone is sufficient to fill the governance gap created by new global challenges such as global economic imbalances and climate change. At best, these new institutional forms represent a partial solution.Footnote ²³

The complex architecture of global governance

The contemporary global governance system has some features of both complexity and polycentricity. It can be usefully characterized as a multilayered, multisectoral, and multiactor system in which institutions and politics matter in important ways to the determination of global policy outcomes; that is, who gets what when and why.

Global governance is multilayered insofar as the making and implementation of global policies can involve a process of political cooperation and coordination between suprastate, national transnational, and often substate agencies. Humanitarian relief operations, for example, often require the coordinated efforts of global, regional, national, and local agencies. In this respect, global governance is not so much hierarchical (command and control from the top) as horizontal: a process that involves coordination and cooperation between agencies across various levels, from the local to the global. However, the configuration of power and politics differs from sector to sector and from issue to issue, such that policy outcomes are not readily controlled by the same groups ‒ interests and influence may vary from issue to issue. For instance, in the December 2012 climate negotiations in Qatar, poor nations formed a strong lobbying coalition to establish the prospect, in principle, of rich nations having to compensate poorer nations for material losses due to climate change. In the Doha trade round, coordinated developing country action by the Group of 77 (G77) has essentially blocked progress in the negotiations by insisting that the trade-distorting effects of industrialized agriculture subsidies should be addressed at least along with issues like services and further tariff reductions. Outcomes can be contingent, in other words, on bargaining, coalition politics, consensus, and compromise, rather than on deference to hegemonic power, significant though this may be.Footnote ²⁴ The politics of global governance is, thus, significantly differentiated; the politics of global trade regulation is quite distinct from the politics of climate or peacekeeping. Rather than being monolithic or unitary, the system is best understood as sectoral or segmented.

Finally, many of the agencies of and participants in the global governance complex are no longer simply public bodies. There is considerable involvement of representatives from transnational civil society, from Greenpeace to Oxfam and an array of NGOs; of the corporate sector from Monsanto to BP and trade or industrial associations; and of mixed public‒private organizations such as the International Organization of Security Commissions (IOSCO). In addition to being multilayered and multisectoral, global governance is a multiactor complex in which diverse agencies participate in the formulation and conduct of global public policy.

A polycentric conception of global governance does not imply that all states or agencies have an equal voice or input into ‒ let alone an equal influence over ‒ its agenda or programmes. On the contrary, there is a recognition that the system is institutionally biased or distorted in favor of powerful states and vested interests: it is not by chance that in recent years the promotion of the global market has taken priority over tackling poverty, reducing inequality, and achieving the Millennium Development Goals more broadly. Yet the very nature of economic globalization is such that in weaving, however unevenly, thickening webs of worldwide interconnectedness, hierarchical and hegemonic forms of governance become more costly and demanding to pursue, and less effective and legitimate. A notion of shared or common global problems ensures that multilateralism can work to moderate (though not to eliminate) power asymmetries.Footnote ²⁵ Even the most powerful recognize that without, at least, the formal participation and tacit agreement of the weak or marginalized, effective and especially legitimate solutions to global problems ‒ whether terrorism or money laundering which directly impinge on their own welfare ‒ would be impracticable. In these new circumstances of ‘complex interdependence’, in which the returns to hierarchy are outweighed generally by the benefits of multilateral cooperation, traditional ‘hard’ power instruments ‒ military force or economic coercion ‒ have a more circumscribed influence. This too creates new political opportunities for private actors and the forces of transnational civil society which can mobilize considerable ‘soft power’ resources in the pursuit of diverse objectives.Footnote ²⁶

Sovereignty and the limits to the diffusion of authority

To further understand the impact of intergovernmentalism and transnational governance on sovereignty and political authority, it is important to reflect more closely on how, and to what extent, the former reshapes the latter. In this regard, it is possible to formulate an hypothesis that illuminates the willingness of states to share and diffuse their authority to other agencies in the global governance complex. It could be put thus: when international and transnational agencies pursue policy agendas that are congruent with state interests, states are more likely to comply with policy outcomes and regulatory standards. When this is not the case, however, and states are confronted with policy outcomes and standards contrary to their interests, principles of sovereignty are typically evoked as a means to trump the agenda of global collaboration and coordination. Moreover, this will more commonly occur among those states able to challenge and ignore international and transnational pressures and forces. Take the areas of security and environment as examples.

Gridlock in the global order

The proliferation of intergovernmentalism and transnational governance mechanisms in the postwar period is a striking trend. While the complex global governance system has characteristics of a multilayered, multisectoral, and multiactor system, the question remains how far political authority has been diffused in practice throughout the global order. The global political agenda is increasingly shaped by a diversity of voices and agents, but sovereignty remains a powerful obstacle to the development and execution of policy in areas sensitive to the interests of leading states.

The deadlock in nuclear disarmament and the failure to deal effectively with terrorism sits uncomfortably with the current stalemate in climate change negotiations. The international institutions we rely on to solve global problems seem less and less able to do so, even as the problems themselves grow worse. Why is this?

After the war, the dominant countries, led by the United States, built an extraordinary set of multilateral institutions, as previously noted. Bodies like the United Nations created a system of collective security, and the Bretton Woods institutions set the world on a path toward managed economic integration. Over the following decades, a virtuous cycle ensued. Cooperation between countries allowed companies and individuals to forge connections across borders. These links increased mutual dependence, creating greater need for institutionalized cooperation to manage common problems. Accordingly, states created more global bodies and treaties, new international organizations, international standards, and regulations – thousands of which now exist, regulating most aspects of our lives. Cooperation undergirded globalization, and deepening globalization, in turn, required more cooperation to manage.

For most of the postwar period, this process of ‘self-reinforcing interdependence’ worked extraordinarily well, at least compared to any other historical period. It worked so well that multilateral cooperation created conditions that eventually halted and arguably even undermined its own success. This phenomenon can be characterized as gridlock, a basket of trends that is today making international cooperation more difficult, even as deepening globalization and interdependence mean that we need global cooperation now more than ever.

Four separate dynamics have combined to produce gridlock. One, the rise of new powers such as India, China, and Brazil means that a more diverse array of interests have to be hammered into agreements for any global deal to be made. Two, the problems themselves have also grown more complex, penetrating deep into domestic policies. Three, the institutions created 70 years ago have proven difficult to change as established interests cling to outmoded decision-making rules that fail to reflect current conditions. And last, in many areas international institutions have proliferated with overlapping and contradictory mandates, creating a confusing fragmentation of authority.

Recognizing that gridlock is a general condition of global politics ‒ not just an issue-specific blockage ‒ is an important step toward designing effective solutions to the trends it encapsulates. But at the same time, it militates against a hope in ‘silver bullet’ solutions. The problems facing global cooperation are long-term trends, and the solutions are likely to be equally gradual.

Several trends offer promise. First, even as traditional state-to-state international organizations stall new forms of cross-border cooperation that involve companies, networks of cities, NGOs and other types of actors are filling some of the ‘governance gap’ gridlock creates. In most issue areas, it remains to be seen how effective these new institutions can be, but they offer at least a partial solution. Second, while gridlock trends make political leadership unlikely, they do not render it impossible. Space remains for individual policymakers or broad social movements to force change. The key here may be in new actors – or coalitions of actors – forging links across issue areas. The radical increase in interconnectedness that has overwhelmed our existing institutional ‘technology’ may yet lead us to clearer roads ahead. At the present time, however, the question remains whether these potential pathways through gridlock will be sufficient to meet the governance demands of a stable and sustainable world order.

About the author

David Held is Master of University College, Durham and Professor of Politics and International Relations at Durham University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Director of the Institute of Global Policy, Durham University and Visiting Professor at LUISS University in Rome. He is author of more than 60 written or edited books and of an extensive number of academic articles on democracy, democratization, globalization, global governance, and global policy – over a 25-year period. David has wide-ranging teaching experience at a diversity of university levels, including developing and implementing new degree programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in both leading research-driven universities and at the Open University, UK. David also has far-reaching administrative and management experience in both universities and the private sector. Founder and Director of Polity Press, the Durham Global Policy Institute and the Wiley-Blackwell flagship journal, Global Policy. His main research interests include the study of globalization, changing forms of democracy, and the prospects of regional and global governance.